Grail - Elizabeth Bear [30]
Tristen paused, waiting for his moment. “Well, I guess we were delayed for rather a long time.”
She held it in for a while before the laughter broke free and she snorted—one of those times where it was plain to him that she was not Sparrow and in some ways barely resembled her. The appearance of a face had a lot to do with how one wore it, and Sparrow had grown up in the House of Conn, trained from a young age to comport herself as a lady.
Dorcas was something else—a high-handed Engineer turned priest. Tristen, who had not known her in her old life, imagined she’d been a woman who played as hard as she worked. And even today, she worked hard.
She squeezed lemon over the fish, leaving Tristen to wonder where the trees were. This enclave of Go-Backs also exported mango, chocolate, and vanilla—a tropical extravagance of edibles. They were efficient agriculturalists who had maintained better mechanical control of their holdes and domaines than most of the isolated communities on the Jacob’s Ladder. Even after fifty years of occasional visits, he hadn’t had the opportunity to explore more than a small percentage of their Heaven.
She handed him a plate and gestured to a communal pot of brown rice, steaming slightly around the loose-fitting lid. Tristen ladled out a portion, pressing a depression into the center to hold the fish juices. Dorcas accepted the now-laden plate he handed back without a word.
The silence held while she slid fish onto the plate, turned off the stove, wiped out the pan, and hung it for the next cook’s use. She pulled a whittled wooden fork from a cup and led him back out into the filtered and supplemented light of the fast-approaching sun.
Tristen grabbed two bent-metal cups on the way out and dipped them into a water jug by the pavilion door. He dropped onto the grass next to Dorcas as she seated herself and handed her one of the two when her hand was free. This is my role in life.
They sipped. The water was faintly dusty-tasting, but sweet, and Tristen’s symbiont told him it was tolerably clean. He wondered if the Go-Backs filtered it through folded cloth after they pulled it out of the fish ponds, or if they had something more elaborate set up.
After three bites of onions, fish, and rice, she said, “You might have kept that from us.”
“We might have.”
“But for how long?”
He smiled. Another blessing of the circumstances of their reacquaintance—and all the parallel history that lay behind it—was that Dorcas felt no need for polite fictions with him, if she ever felt them with anyone. “I’d prefer to think of us as being on the same team when it comes to the survival of the world and all the people in it. Since we got under way again, there’s been no need for enmity or disagreement between your people and the Conn. We’re going somewhere and, historically speaking, the Edenites”—he chose the polite term—“were all for that. Your faction’s argument against harboring at the waystars was never about returning to Earth; it was always predicated on finding a safe landing zone. And at the time, Earth was the only one we knew how to get to.”
She had to know where he was going, but she wasn’t going to give him an inch that he didn’t earn. “But?”
“Things change,” he said softly. “Time passes. We know that better than most.”
Because we are older than most. The expression she shot him around a forkful of fish was wry and appreciative, or he could spin it that way. But she still didn’t let him off the hook—or whatever the parallel metaphor was for those who preferred to tickle their dinners from the water. For the fish, it was nevertheless as tragic a seduction as any encounter with pole and reel.
“What I’m suggesting,” he offered, “is that people forget the reasoning behind a dogma, and eventually come to treat the dogma itself as holy writ.”
“You mean like that book in the case outside the Bridge?”
Tristen nodded. All these centuries later, all the revelations of how his ancestors had betrayed and been betrayed in the name of God, and the idea of blasphemy, still sent a frisson up his neck. Even